Award Winners

2016-2017 Engineering Faculty Awards Announced

The School of Engineering is proud to announce the 2016-17 School of Engineering Faculty Award recipients: Yi Fang (computer engineering) is Teacher of the Year. We have double the excellence this year as Hisham Said (civil engineering) and Yi Fang (computer engineering) tied for the School of Engineering Researcher of the Year. Shane Rogers ’13 MS (engineering management and leadership) is Adjunct Lecturer of the Year; and Ralph Morganstern receives the Gerald E. Markle Award for Teaching Excellence in Engineering and Applied Mathematics.

School of Engineering Teacher of the Year – Yi Fang

Dr. Yi Fang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering, where he teaches courses in advanced programming, web technologies, and machine learning. He routinely earns high teaching evaluations in his courses, and he has earned a strong reputation as a skilled instructor. Students praise his teaching style, humor, preparedness, availability, responsiveness, and dedication to student success. Attendance at his office hours has been described as participating in a pilgrimage, not only to gain clarity on course material but also to receive advice on internships, research opportunities, and graduate studies.

SOE Researcher of the Year – Tie: Yi Fang and Hisham Said

Since joining the Department of Computer Engineering as assistant professor in 2012, Yi Fang has established a strong research program in data science, has published 6 journal papers, 15 competitively peer-reviewed conference papers, and 1 book chapter, and garnered more than $160,000 in external research funding over the past three years. Dr. Fang has proposed theoretical retrieval models and developed intelligent algorithms that organize and analyze enormous amounts of heterogeneous information on the Web. His work has advanced the state-of-the-art in information retrieval and has fostered cross-disciplinary collaborations at SCU and beyond. His effort to deploy a Hadoop cluster in the Engineering Computing Center has benefited multiple research groups in the School of Engineering, and he actively solicits collaborations with Silicon Valley companies for accessing their massive datasets, computing resources, funding opportunities, and joint publications.

Dr. Hisham Said joined the Department of Civil Engineering as assistant professor in 2012. Since then, he has published 12 journal publications, presented 10 conference papers, and was awarded the ELECTRI International Early Career Award. While multifold, his research on improving the efficiency of construction operations and sustainable development of the built environment focuses on industrialized construction and intelligent jobsite management—innovations to production techniques and technologies that are crucial to improved performance of the rapidly evolving construction industry. His contributions include newdecision-making and simulation models for industrialized construction management to optimize the design, supply, planning and control of prefabricated building assemblies. He also analyzes the manufactured homes industry as a supplier of affordable housing to study their modular design, fabrication practices, and market structure. Additionally, he develops novel spatial planning models and telematics-based data-driven monitoring of heavy construction equipment.

Adjunct Lecturer of the Year Award – Shane Rogers

Shane Rogers has been teaching at Santa Clara University for the past five years. He created and teaches (twice a year) the 1-unit Product Opportunity Assessment course as part of the School of Engineering’s innovation and entrepreneurship program; he has recently created a 1-unit follow-on for this course which will be offered for the first time in the Spring of 2017. In teaching the Product Opportunity Assessment course, Shane brings to bear his considerable experience as a serial entrepreneur of both social and commercial start-ups; he is currently the founder and president of Hive Design, a local product design firm. Shane’s teaching evaluations are routinely above 4.5/5.0, and students often describe this course as being rewarding, inspirational, and something that every student should take. In addition to teaching the Product Opportunity Assessment course, Shane contributes to the KEEN innovation and entrepreneurship program as a speaker, panelist, and mentor; he has also taught a faculty development session on Opportunity Recognition at a KEEN conference. Rogers received his master’s degree in engineering management and leadership from Santa Clara University in 2013.

Gerald E. Markle Award – Ralph Morganstern

Ralph Morganstern began teaching applied mathematics in the graduate program at Santa Clara University in 1991. Since then he has taught two-quarter sequences in numerical analysis and in probability many times, engaging students by integrating examples from his many years of experience in the aerospace industry. He has applied fundamental concepts of physics to help formulate mathematical models and develop efficient algorithms useful in engineering contexts including image enhancement, atmospheric optics, data fusion, satellite tracking, communications, and processing of radar data. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and master's and doctoral degrees in physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has published papers on general relativity, astrophysics, and cosmology.